Standing six-foot-three with a booming voice and the body of a football lineman, Bishop Ed Lockett won't have any problem getting the attention of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church in Alabama.

Lockett oversees about 25,000 members in 182 CME churches in Alabama and about 7,000 members in 43 CME churches in Florida. Like many mainline denominations, the CME has been fairly stagnant in membership.

"The key will be church growth," Lockett said. "I hope to expand ministry. I have a passion for community economic development, better housing and education. I am a proponent of charter schools. The church must be involved in entrepreneurial ventures to fund ministries."

The CME, founded in 1870, has about 850,000 members in 3,500 U.S. churches.

Since he was elected bishop on July 4, Lockett has been presiding at regional conferences each week, including one in Birmingham the past week. That involved appointing pastors to churches.

"The responsibility of assigning pastors to churches is by far the most challenging," Lockett said. "It requires a good deal of prayer, planning and consultation."

Lockett said he wants pastors to be aggressive in outreach.

"If the pastor would get involved with the community and cast that vision, the people will follow," Lockett said.

Lockett had been pastor of the Metropolitan CME Church in Houston for 25 years, where in 2009 he oversaw the construction of a $7 million sanctuary for the 1,500-member congregation.

It had been a small congregation when Lockett arrived.

"We had to build and develop ministries," Lockett said.

Lockett wants the CME Church to market itself.

"We're in the marketplace," he said. "We need to prepare ministers to lead in the community and respond to needs."

Loyalty to denomination seems to have faded into the past, Lockett said.

"The church does not have the kind of awe it had when I started," he said. "If the church said it, it was not questioned. People should be free to express themselves, not because the church says. They must understand why. It must be practical and fit into the life journey."

Lockett served in the U.S. Air Force from 1965-69, working with Titan II missile installations as part of the Strategic Air Command.

He was often 10 stories underground in top-secret missile control rooms, monitoring the Cold War from nuclear ground zero.

"There were tense moments," Lockett said. "Thank God we never had to use it."

While he was in the military, he felt called into the ministry.

Lockett was born in Georgia, but his Jamaican father took the family to Jamaica for a while before settling down in St. Augustine, Fla., where he played football at Richard J. Murray High School. There's still a trace of Jamaican accent in Lockett's deep voice.

He was pastor of CME churches in Florida, Virginia and Ohio before spending most of his ministerial career in Texas.

Miles College in Fairfield remains one of the top CME-affiliated colleges in the country, Lockett said.

"We're very proud of what Miles College has meant to this community and the world," he said.